BT Aims to Bring Security 'Assurance' to Global Customers

VIDEO: British Telecom (BT) Security President Mark Hughes discusses the challenges and opportunities of security at telco scale for customers around the world

British Telecom (BT) is one of the world's largest technology service providers, delivering a wide range of capabilities to customers in Britain and around the world. A core set of capabilities that BT provides are security services, both to protect customers as well as BT's own network.
Leading the telco's global security efforts is Mark Hughes, president of BT Security. In a wide ranging video interview with eWEEK, Hughes details the technologies that BT is bringing to market to help defend itself and its customers, as well as the key security challenges his organization faces.
Hughes said that the challenge of modern IT security isn't about having a lack of data, but rather about having too much data. That's where the BT Assure security technology platform comes into play, which includes a capability to take in multiple sources of information and make sense of them. It's an effort of Olympic proportions.
"We really started at this when we were the lead sponsor of technology for the London 2012 Olympics," Hughes said. "We built the capability so we could get better situational awareness during the games period, and we have now developed that so we have a reference architecture not just running for BT, but for a number of our customers as well."

As a major carrier of Internet traffic, Hughes noted that BT has seen an increasing volume of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. He emphasized that for BT availability risk is very important. In terms of potential nation-state sponsored attacks, Hughes said that it's not an area of specific anxiety.

However, Hughes said, "We're a large commercial organization that operates globally, and we have to be ready for anything."
Watch the full video with Mark Hughes below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.